When I first started programming back in the late 1970’s, there were not a lot of examples of existing programs. Sure, most BASIC manuals had some simple programs, in fact, the TRS-80 shipped with an excellent manual written by David Lien, however a serious developer quickly ran through those simple programs. David Ahl’s books that featured computer games written in BASIC, and new magazine such as Byte quickly filled the void.

By the time modems and BBS’s first came about in the early 80’s, programmers started to share source code, and make it available for use. In many ways, this was the origin of open source software. Developers freely made available pieces of code that they had developed.

The Programmer’s Corner was a repository for many of these collections. It became one of the most popular sources for software developers looking for just that right piece of code that could help them finish their project. In addition, the message boards were visited by some of the best programmers at the time, always willing to help out with a particularly difficult problem. In a pre-Google world, this was pretty heady stuff. Having individuals like Bill Parke uploading super useful DOS utilities that also included the source code opened up a new world for those who had been forced to buy prepackaged commercial programs, or go without. To see some examples of early ASM code, visit here.

When I first started my BBS in 1985, the goal was pretty simple, setup a computer to answer the phone and see who was on the other end! There was something very interesting about hosting a platform that allowed anonymous folks from around the world to post their thoughts. My first BBS as called The Monolith, after the famous object in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. It was a simple BBS that allowed folks to login and post a message or two. At the time, it hosted a pretty lively political debate, as well as other interesting conversations, some of which I will share in future posts.

In the next few years, I along with my friend Drue Kennon wrote our own BBS software, PcConnect, that was built from the ground up to support multiple simultaneous callers. This system allowed callers to not only read messages and download files, but also to chat to each other in real-time. Remember, this was in the late 80’s, 10 years before AIM was a hit.

Along the way, the BBS morphed from The Monolith to The Programmer’s Corner, a meeting place for software developers who were just starting to really take advantage of these cool PC’s. By the end, TPC hosted over 25,000 files that totaled 12.5G’s in space (A crazy amount of space 20 years ago). You can now access many of these files here.

In 1993, this was one of the largest BBS’s in the country. At its peak, it supported over 20 lines, with some eventually having access to the Internet before browsers were even invented. Callers could access telnet, gopher, and FTP. The Internet ultimately killed it off.

This was also a subscription service for access to the large collection of source code for programmers. In 1992, over 1000 software developers were subscribers. If you needed source code pre-Internet, The Programmer’s Corner was a must stop visit.